This chapter presents evidence from Theban tombs and mortuary temples to show that expressions of 'others' and of self-identity changed as the Egyptian elite adjusted to a new perceptual reality, one in which Egypt increasingly became part of the Mediterranean world. It states that texts and images included in Egyptian-mortuary contexts were not there primarily to record historical-events but to demonstrate the qualities of the person whom they commemorated. Representations in Theban private tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty show northerners as offering-bearers. These tombs generally belonged to members of the Egyptian high elite, high priests of Amun, viziers, and mayors of Thebes, many of whom held several positions during their careers. A pertinent example is Menkheperreseneb, a High Priest of Amun under Thutmose III in the Eighteenth-Dynasty, interred in Theban Tomb. Northerners depicted at Medinet Habu, the mortuary temple of the Twentieth-Dynasty king now generally known as Ramesses III, serve a similar function, albeit in a different way.

Both the apostle Paul and the risen Jesus envision a spreading of the Christian movement out from Jerusalem into the circumference of the Mediterranean world, as far as Rome, and 'to the ends of the earth'. This chapter traces the progress and effects of that dispersion of Christian communities in the first three centuries, to Asia Minor, Achaea, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Gaul, North Africa and Rome. Two major socio-political events without a doubt shaped Christian community destiny. The first crucial event was the seige and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 66-70 CE. Eusebius reports that the Jerusalem Christians, warned by an oracle via a revelation, fled from Jerusalem before its inhabitants were locked inside for the gruelling final siege. The second crucial event was Hadrian's suppression of the revolt of Bar Kochba in 132-5 CE, and rededication of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, with Jews forbidden, not only to live there, but even to gazeuponit from a distance.

At the beginning of the seventh century, the Byzantine Empire was part of a political configuration focussed on the Mediterranean world, which had been familiar for centuries and was characterised by two factors, one external and the other internal. The administration of the Byzantine Empire, both civil and military, was essentially what had emerged from the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine in the late third and early fourth centuries. The authors describe the life of the Byzantine church in the seventh century emerging from the 102 canons of the Quinisext Synod, called by the emperor Justinian II in 692.The end of the seventh century saw the Byzantine Empire still in a process of transition and redefinition: the Arab threat to Constantinople was to continue well into the eighth century, and Iconoclasm, which is seen as a further stage in the Byzantine Empire's search for its identity and ways of expressing this in the aftermath of crisis of the seventh century.

Under John II and Manuel I Byzantium remained a wealthy and expansionist power, maintaining the internal structures and external initiatives which were necessary to sustain a traditional imperial identity in a changing Mediterranean world of crusaders, Turks and Italian merchants. The revival of imperial interest in the crusader states had permanent consequences in that it led to a renewal of Byzantine links with Western Europe. Yet the period following Manuel's death and the overthrow of the regency government of Alexios II saw reversion to something like the isolationism of John II's early years. The Byzantine state was one of the most centralized in the medieval world, and never more so than in the period 1081-1180, when the loss of central and eastern Anatolia forced the empire's military elite, as well as its bureaucratic elite, to identify with the capital as never before. Under the successors of Manuel I, the Comnenian system, centred on Constantinople, was programmed for self-destruction.